Peter Saul

you invited me to your home, and there it was: your black book. A diary, perhaps, rather a keeper or even an anchor of yours. Of your life as an artist. Of what you see and what you think, what surrounds you, what dazzles you, what inquiets you.

When my wife asked me: why Peter Saul? I said it’s about conti- nuity and consistency. What a crap she said. That’s what every critic says about every artist, that it must be about continuity and consistency. What was the momentum? she asked me. What was your momentum?

Then I told her about your book. And that, later at your studio, you had showed me around your paintings and your works on paper. paper. Finally you had opened up your drawn archive to me, rather studies, perhaps, or sketches, fragments maybe.

And I was struck. I fell for this. It is your thoughts, drawn but unrefined, your comments, caught but not filtered, it is an archive of you, but also an archive of me, of us, of our coummunities, our societies, our lives as mankind in a big bowl of boiling mishmash.

It is not processed by our languages, it is from your mind for your mind to keep in mind. It is 60 years or even more, I don’t know.

It is imagery, powerful, mostly enormous, it is forcing. It is not so much American, there is no warning or insurance against this.

Maybe I was not prepared, surely I wasn’t insured against your imagery, and no one is, no one could ever be, could we?

This imagery, your imagery is mankind. Is us. Has been for a long time, and will never stop being. Brutal and at the same time loving. And it is everywhere, in Paris, or in New York, or at the end of the rainbow. Everywhere and forever.